LB

It is today in New York and tomorrow in Tokyo. It’s the wee hours of the morning in Barcelona. With a hop, skip, and a jump, I can cross the international dateline from today to yesterday to back to tomorrow, and I left a part of my heart in all of the above time zones.

When you travel, you become acutely aware of how home will never be the same again, because you are not the same. 

As a kid, I learned home was finite. It could only be one place. My mother cried when I called New York City “home” for the first time. I think she interpreted that as me leaving the nest, but the home I grew up in will always be a home to me. As a woman that sees the world, I’ve learned I have many places to be. 

Home is everywhere you are and nowhere that you aren’t. You find pockets of home in people, in places, in reminders of the past, and divine moments that shed light on the future. In new friends that validate your dreams, in mentors and teachers, in karaoke bars and lover’s eyes and tiny little moments that scramble around in the dark until sunrise. 

I have found slices of home everywhere I’ve been. I’ve found it in the woman from southern Thailand that dresses identical to my mother, on a windowsill overlooking Portugal on my first visit, on the rocky coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, and in every lake at the base of a mountain; I’ve found that every grandmother over the age of 85 has the same warm feeling stored in a cupboard in their kitchen. Home is anywhere that time stops. Home is where I can put my watch down, and turn the alarms off. 

Those pockets of time; the moments when everything makes sense and nothing else exists…that’s what I call home. That is when I feel my safest, my most complete, and my most alive. 

I’m slowly accepting that I may never have just one place of residence again. 

I haven’t had a permanent address in almost 7 years, 

I’ve always been moving,

Never stuck to one place…

I tried to stay stuck for the past 6 months in New York City. I joined a gym, I went consistently. I had a daily walk, a coffee shop to be a regular at, and a Trader Joe’s. For so long, all I wanted was the consistency. Then, the rose colored glasses wore off, and I learned that sometimes straightjackets disguise themselves as security blankets.

A friend of mine often alludes to this concept of Comfortable Hell vs. Uncomfortable Heaven and notions that we have to pick one.

I see it more as a punnet square: the variables being comfortable/uncomfortable, and heaven/hell. 

I know what uncomfortable hell feels like. Uncomfortable hell is something you survive. Comfortable hell, on the other hand, is more so an internal battle. It’s the loudness of a city that you’re not sure you belong in, but can’t build up the courage to leave. Comfortable hell is Stockholm syndrome. It comes when we take validation from the external. We ignore the calling of our innards, and we make that enough. 

Uncomfortable heaven is what peaks our curiosities. It arrives when dipping your toes into a new experience; it feels a little bit like walking up an escalator. It feels like trying to get your screen time down, finally having a breakthrough, and we make that enough. 

I tried so hard to enjoy comfortable hell. 

I made it enough for a long time. 

I feel this urge every day; the intuitive pull to go, to fly, to be free, bubbling up inside me. Now, I have the strength to do what I couldn’t before. 

I packed up my life. 

I left New York. 

Because while I love her, 

I crave the peace and knowledge of a thousand other places. 

It’s always dawn somewhere and it’s always dusk somewhere else and I’m always going to be acutely aware of that. When it’s the middle of the day in my parent’s kitchen in Pennsylvania, it’s the middle of the night in Tokyo. The whole world can’t be awake at once. 

My place in the family of things is out here. 

In those moments of stillness, of wholeness, of utter completeness, 

When everything makes sense,

And nothing else exists. 

I don’t know what’s next,

but I hope the journey is grand and beautiful.